Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Interpretation
Chekhov's works offer endless insights into the details of storytelling and character.
Tom Stoppard highlights the richness of Anton Chekhov's plays, suggesting that both directors and actors find immense value in exploring the intricate narratives embedded within his texts. This depth of storytelling allows for continuous discovery and interpretation, making Chekhov's works a rewarding experience for those involved in their performance.
In practice
In a theater workshop discussing the nuances of character development.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.
I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
That the best piece of art a person is capable of making is the one that only they could create.
I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.
I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another.
Any good story can galvanize a person, make him/her think about things a different way, reassess their own motives and needs, but that's never my intent. That's an unintended consequence of me just trying to entertain, to write what we used to call 'ripping yarns.'
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